Sift the Human Storm for Souls
by Cygna-hime
Summary: Late in an October night, Subaru Sumeragi heard a train whistle unlike any other. Be careful what you wish for, Subaru...you just might get it. [AU]


**Dear Mr. Bradbury: I'm sorry. Dear Subaru Snugglers: I'm sorry. Dear CLAMP: I'm not sorry. What, like it's worse than what you put him through?**

**Not mine, neither of them. Technically speaking, is a crossover. Inspired by a)the Togakushishrine 'spooky' challenge, and b)my standard end-of-October reading. Ph34r--no, I can't make myself say it. Just read it. Or not, as the case may be. I control you do not. I talk like Yoda tend to. Some kind of personality flaw it seems to be.**

Sift the Human Storm for Souls

Subaru was sitting up late on an autumn night when he heard it. A train whistle, wailing into the town he city. He heard trains constantly from his window, but never one like this. The train wailed with all the tears he had cried, and all the tears he had never cried. It screamed all the screams he had never had the strength to give voice. In the autumn air, the sound carried itself to his ear as if it was meant expressly for him. He fell asleep listening to it shriek and watching the numbers on the clock tick: 3:00, 3:30, 4:00 am.

In the morning he left early, looking for the train that had come in the night. It would, he felt certain, still be there. His magical sense told him there was something near that had been gone before, and he followed the sense of something strange until at last he found it: a carnival. The lemon-yellow tents fluttered in the breeze, and signs proclaimed:

**The World-Wide Sensation! Cooger and Dark's Pandemonium Carnival! In Tokyo October 24th only!**

He wandered through the crowds of laughing people, past the standard-issue games and contests, dodging the sellers of suspicious food on sticks. Annoyed at the curious, suspicious and downright lustful looks his unusual appearance kept attracting, Subaru ducked away from the central aisle and meandered through the tents on the sides, looking for he knew not what hint of enchantment.

He passed by the Hall of Mirrors, and turned out of habit to glance inside at the grotesque stretchings and squashings of his own reflection. There were none. Looking back at him was a boy no more than fifteen with two wide green eyes. Subaru knew the face that smiled into his. It was his own face, from what felt like a lifetime ago.

He ran into the icehouse of reflection, desperate to understand how a carnival that had arrived one October night could have shown his self of another time in their commonplace attractions. Inside the Hall of Mirrors, nothing moved. Nothing but him and the mirror-Subaru, smiling even as the real one stared in horror.

"Who are you?" Subaru called to the ice. "Why can I see you? You're not real!"

The images of his young self smiled in unison. "Why," they said, "_I'_m real. You're_ not_!"

"No," he whispered back, but with no conviction, "no. I'm real. You're ghosts, or spirits, or something. You're not real." But he knew, none better, that no ghost and no spirit could look so much like he had looked once upon a time. None would know. There were only two people left who remembered him as he had been then, his grandmother...and himself.

Subaru fled the hall of hourglass icicles, returning with gasping breaths to the sunny autumn day outside. There was something wrong with the carnival. Somewhere, there was something that would make it all make sense. And maybe, just maybe, it would mean he could stop seeing the smiling face, his smiling face, in the blackness beneath his eyelids.

One by one he searched every game and attraction, but none were more than they seemed except for the silver slices of eternity away in the Hall of Mirrors. The day was winding down into a warm evening, and in groups and couples the visitors were wandering away to their homes and their families. Subaru stayed. He was determined to find out what was behind the carnival's cheerful front, and why it was so enticing.

As the daylight faded, he approached the one thing he had not checked. A carousel stood at the end of the row of tents, its blue and brass dazzling even in the orange light of sunset. A sign on the rail read: OUT OF ORDER.

Subaru wasn't sure he believed it. He believed it even less when a man whom he vaguely recognized as one of the owners climbed onto the carousel. Finally sure he was getting somewhere, Subaru slipped behind a tent to remain unrecognized. The man laughed loudly, flashing white teeth.

"Take it away, Cooger!" he called to his partner, who stood at the controls. The red-haired man nodded, flipped a few switches, and the carousel began to move. The haunting tune, one Subaru could almost but not quite name, swirled out into the evening as the horses began to spin...backwards. Backwards they danced, ten times, and then the dark man leapt lightly from the carousel, not a day over twenty years old.

Subaru couldn't suppress a gasp, and both men looked sharply into the shadows. He crouched behind the tent, praying not to be seen. Apparently he needn't have bothered, for the dark man said, "Come out there, whoever you are! We won't hurt you." Subaru highly doubted it, but as he saw no alternative, stepped out into the light cast by the carousel lights.

"Who are you?" he said for lack of anything better to say. "What are you doing here?"

The dark man laughed again. "We're wish-fulfillers of a sort, you could say. My partner here and I make a wonderful living traveling here and there giving people what they want. My card." He bowed and extended a white business card. Subaru took it automatically.

_J. C. Cooger and G. M. Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show. Everything under the sun. Our specialty: to examine, oil, and repair death-watch beetles. _Words and pictures swirled into being on the card as he held it. Subaru stared blankly as Mr. Dark continued.

"Now, I suspect you're here with us tonight because something you saw today was, shall we say, a bit of an eye-opener?" He paced around Subaru, courteous but vaguely threatening all the same. Subaru didn't budge. This was a tactic he was used to. "Life hasn't been kind to you for some time now, that's the way of it. It's not at all the way you imagined it would be when you were younger. A bit duller than you expected, full of more kicks than kisses? Ah, yes, I thought so. You get good at judging people in this business. And I expect you saw something today that brought you back to how things used to be, when you were young. As you see, Mr.--?"

"Sumeragi." Subaru spoke almost unconsciously. "Subaru Sumeragi."

"--Mr. Sumeragi, we are in a unique position to help you. Will there ever be such a chance again? No! We are the only, the only operation of our kind in existence! Should you refuse, know that you will never have another chance to start over. I can give you perhaps five minutes to think it over before we must either assist you or--not. Do consider."

Subaru stood and thought. He didn't trust the men, either of them, but what they were offering was so tempting. It would mean leaving the Fate of the World in the others' hands, but then he had never been much use to them anyway. And now...what was there, really, to hold him? Why should he not go back to a time before he had known what sorrow was?

It took him less than a minute to decide. "Yes. Help me."

Mr. Dark led him quickly to the carousel. "Stay in one place, and don't jump off, it's not healthy. How many years off were you looking for?"

"Ten." Subaru sighed. Ten years ago he had been happy, even though he hadn't known it at the time. And now he would go back to that.

The calliope wailed again, and Subaru felt the years stripped away from his body as the carousel spun back, back...It was done. He looked at his hand. It was a far younger man's hand, pale and soft, without the perpetual paper cuts he had become accustomed to having. He was young again. But--where was the peace he remembered? Nothing was changed except his body. He could still remember everything, or thought he could. Had it not worked? He saw his reflection in the brass pole of the carousel; a boy in his teens, with two green eyes.

Subaru stared at himself, at his too-young body and too-complete face. Was it real? Had anything ever been real? He couldn't believe it, couldn't understand why he still felt broken but didn't look it. It was too much, too much at once. No one could be expected to handle being so much more complete in body than in mind. He did the only thing he could. He screamed, pounding his fist against the grinning wooden horse.

Mr. Dark smiled as he half-jumped, half-fell from the carousel. It was no longer such a nice smile. "I'm afraid the years are only gone on the outside, Mr. Sumeragi. Was that a problem?"

"Put me back," Subaru gasped. He couldn't handle being stripped of everything that reminded him of who he was, of who he had been. What he had gotten wasn't what he had wanted, and now all he wanted was to be back in the body he understood, the body that matched his heart. "Make me the way I was."

"Now, we can't do that just yet," Mr. Dark said smoothly. "There has to be a price, you see. The first ride is free, of course, but for the second...you pay double. I'll tell you what. You come along with us for a while, be a part of the carnival, and in a bit or so we'll see if we can't bring you back to the age you'd rather be. But only if you help us, mind. Only if you pay."

Subaru shook his head weakly. "No. No, I won't, I can't." He turned, looking for a way to run, but the silent shape of Mr. Cooger glowered in blue-eyed fury behind him. He turned back to Mr. Dark, fumbling for his shikifuku in his pocket.

Mr. Dark smiled again. "It wasn't a request, Mr. Sumeragi." His hand reached out, and Subaru glimpsed a face tattooed on the palm, a face with bright green eyes. Then he was falling, into deep oblivion.

**Arriving in Osaka October 26th! Cooger and Dark's International Sensation, the Shadow-Show Carnival! NEW! The Amazing Astoundo! Great Feats of Prestidigitation! Never Before Seen!**

...and it moves on.

**Question: Is Subaru completely crack-addled? Is this a canonical crack-addled, or a bad-Cygna-go-kill-yourself crack-addled?**

**Further question: Does Ray Bradbury freak out the X/1999 crowd? If not, why not?**

**Homage, of course, to the great Mr. Bradbury and his novel, _Something Wicked This Way Comes_. It's not like he never wrote fanfic himself; I'm sure he'd understand. I worship him, for lo! He was great, and brought great fiction unto the earth, and we were glad.**

**Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it!**


End file.
